News from a Suburban Watershed“Site repair” drives the design of the Gannett company campus.

By Vernon Mays

Tim Hursley

In planning its move from the reflective glass towers of downtown Arlington, Virginia, to a more
suburban site in nearby McLean, media giant Gannett Company, publishers of USA
Today, fixed its gaze on a boomerang-shaped parcel of land in a corporate
office park. The 30-acre site, wedged into the intersection of the Capital
Beltway and the busy Dulles Airport Access Road, was a mixed bag of parts: a
sloped meadow made of fill dirt, an unsightly stormwater management pond, and a
wooded hill that offered a prospect over the entire site. By the time Michael
Vergason, FASLA, got involved in the discussions, Gannett’s representatives and their architects already were
working under the assumption that the best location for the new corporate
headquarters was on the highest elevation, which boasted a stand of mature
oaks.

It was prominent. It was relatively unspoiled. And, says Vergason, it was exactly the wrong place to build.

At any rate, that was the controversial opinion offered at a design team meeting by Doug Hays, ASLA,
a senior designer at Michael Vergason Landscape Architects of Alexandria, Virginia. Instead, Hays offered this alternative: Why not build on the less
desirable part of the site, replant and restore the spoiled portions, and preserve the prime real estate as a kind of park and recreation zone?

With a little prodding, the direction of the project took a radical turn, resulting in a world-class corporate campus that embraces
environmental stewardship with a design that seamlessly blends building and landscape. Through an intense collaborative process with Kohn Pedersen Fox
Architects (KPF) of New York, the design team accommodated the integration of the Gannett Company headquarters
with the news operation for USA Today in a natural setting that has been reconstituted, rather than preserved. But it took some doing to get
there.

From the beginning, Vergason recognized it was a complicated
site, particularly from a regulatory standpoint. Key among the hurdles to
overcome was the stormwater management pond, a 5-acre outholding that is a
catchment for a 270-acre watershed. Owned by WestPark Development Corporation,
the office park’s developers, the pond acts as the stormwater management
facility for the headwaters of Scott’s Run, whose watershed encompasses a large
portion of Tysons Corner, a mammoth “edge city” development north of Route 123
and east of Route 7. The pond’s outfall is at the intersection of the Dulles
Access Road and the outer loop of the Capital Beltway. The Fairfax County
Department of Environmental Management performs yearly inspections of the
outfall structure, dam, and emergency spillway because of their role and
location.

In addition, the county monitors a series of natural
resource corridors that are generally organized along the stream valleys.
Improvements within these corridors receive a higher level of scrutiny,
Vergason says. Stringent height limitations and setback requirements on the
site were part of the development proffers and design restrictions that came
into play because of the proximity of McLean Hamlets, a residential community
immediately across the Dulles Access Road—not to mention that the WestPark
development has its own restrictive covenants. “Every move we made had to be
approved by two other entities that were very, very restrictive,” Vergason
recalls.

Despite the tangled regulatory web, Vergason was encouraged
by the fact that the site’s natural systems offered a sense of order. Its three
fundamental components—the lowland, meadow, and hilltop—suggested a way to
approach the landscape design. “These components of land form, vegetation, and
water actually reinforced one another,” Vergason says. “And this realization
was the precursor to the discussions that you leave the high portions alone,
develop the spoiled low portions, and take the stormwater management pond and
improve it and make it presentable.”

Vergason’s site design had to account for USA
Today’s requirement for large square footage on a single floor for the news
operation. As the designers began to think about the need for oversized floor
plates and parking for 2,000 cars, they realized much of the hilltop would have
to be cut away to accommodate the building program. “In the end, from a purely
aesthetic standpoint, they would have ended up losing what it is that is
attractive about the site to begin with,” Vergason says. “The scale, and the
particular character of the big floor plates, meant that the alternative site
and the program were more compatible.”

Vergason advocated an ecological approach to the site
design. He used the broad principle of “site repair” as a kind of conceptual
basis for the entire project. Simply stated, it means to improve portions of
the site that are in poor condition, and leave the beautiful or healthy parts
alone. “The idea behind this principle is very simple,” Vergason adds, “but it
is often the exact opposite of what usually occurs.”

Although the concept of “site repair” is as much
philosophical as it is prescriptive, Vergason was pragmatic in the way he
channeled the energy and resources of the client to reclaim the spoiled site as
a by-product of the building’s construction. Today a walking path meanders
through a grassy lawn and past a healthy, riparian environment that replaces
what was essentially a dump for poor-quality waste soil. The lower portion of
the site now includes a new wetland that incorporates lush, natural herbaceous
and aquatic plantings where none had existed before. Even the existing
woodlands were restored following a detailed tree survey and development of a
comprehensive plan that called for control of exotic species, removal of dead,
diseased, and declining trees, and selective planting of new indigenous trees
and understory plantings.

An important part of the process was the architect’s
exploration of design alternatives that first studied the possibility of a
building tower, then a series of buildings, and finally a series of buildings
that define an outdoor space. The scheme incorporating buildings that shape a
space gained momentum when Vergason’s office produced a series of analytical
sun/shade diagrams. Those diagrams demonstrated the merits of a building with a
southeast-facing opening that would catch sunlight in a sheltered microclimate.
In addition, that building orientation—the final choice—shielded the outdoor
space from much of the highway noise.

Getting the building in the ideal location allowed the other
pieces of the landscape design to fall into place. Ultimately, KPF’s fragmented scheme for two office
buildings linked by shared spaces yielded a U-shaped plan. With its angled
surfaces and glass fins, the building has a crystalline quality. The individual
identities of Gannett and USA Today are maintained with two low-scale office blocks that extend into the landscape and
embrace an open courtyard. In that void, Vergason created the landscape’s
centerpiece—a terraced green space organized by rusticated stone walls that
define the lawn and planting areas along with runnels, pools, niches, and slot
stair passages.

As inspiration for the asymmetrical arrangement of the
angled stone walls, Vergason recalled the pattern of felled trees that randomly
collect on the floor of wooded hillsides and naturally slow and direct
groundwater, facilitating its cleansing. “This is seen often in a mid-Atlantic
deciduous woodland when the trees that fall parallel to the slopes are caught
by standing trees and remain in place,” he says.

Today a tranquil stream of water meanders down the slope,
collecting against the fieldstone walls, falling over edges, and slithering
through bluestone runnels and weirs to the next collection point. Generated
from a combination of recirculated water and surface runoff, the stream
originates in a pool created next to a large boulder. Pickerelweed grows thick
in the water, along with duckweed that puzzles some of the company’s employees
with its algae-like green clusters.

Trees and understory plants associated with moist soils and
riparian conditions—such as tulip poplars, black gums, willow oaks, and
sweetbay magnolias—sweep up into the courtyard, providing shade and shelter.
The occasional London plane tree, or sycamore, provides a change of scale. Large
beds of ferns and Siberian iris flow along the runnels and the pools, while
climbing plants such as Boston ivy and Virginia creeper soften and green the
stone wall facades.

The building’s spacious lobby overlooks the courtyard and a
lotus pool that abuts the glass facade. The idea behind the pool was “aesthetic
in part, maybe in total,” says Vergason. “It was intended to be reflective in
mood—a beautiful juxtaposition of vertical reflective surfaces and horizontal
ones.” On a sunny day, with the water level in the pool matched exactly to the
finished floor inside, the space seems to rush from inside to out.

Shiny metal tubes rising from the pool release sprays of
water that resemble umbrellas. Others simply gurgle forth a stream of water
that splashes into the pool. “We always imagined this as a field of lotus with
the droplets of water beading up and bouncing across the leaves,” Vergason
explains. The lotus plants were added in the fall of 2004, so this part of the
design is still coming to maturity.

More than two acres of landscape cover the building exterior
in a series of planters on the second- and fourth-floor terraces. On these
floors, occupants can step directly outside into a landscaped environment. The
landscape “delivers all the benefits of a green roof—of thermal control, of
stormwater reduction, and access to green,” Vergason points out. Semishrub
trees such as sumac, embellished with daylilies, coreopsis, and ground cover,
occupy the shallow, two-foot soil beds. Honey locusts are planted in beds that
are 36 inches deep.

The fourth-floor terrace also features thriving honey
locusts, with a simple palette of a variety of evergreen and deciduous
perennial ground covers such as liriope and hosta. On the back side of the
building, facing the highway, a narrow strip of tall grass occupies a small
terrace outside the executive offices. “The effect and the intent were to look
out from those interiors across a little patch of meadow to woods beyond, with
minimal maintenance.”

The largest and most complicated aspect of the project was
the stormwater management pond, because so many entities had to be satisfied.
Vergason’s appeal to WestPark and Fairfax County was based on three factors:
“One, that we were not altering the main pond shape, dam, spillway, and
engineered hydraulic capacities of the pond. Two, that the alterations proposed
for the overflow structure would not change the original design function and
would provide access for periodic maintenance. And three, that we would
maintain or enhance the wildlife habitat of the pond.”

Once he got the buy-in from all the key parties, however,
Vergason was able to make major improvements to the pond. First, to increase
the pond’s ability to function as a collector, he altered the portion closest
to the building by raising the elevation a foot and a half and replanting it
heavily in riparian vegetation to create a forebay and wildlife habitat zone.
In addition to what was planted, more than one-fourth of the landscape
surrounding the pond consists of native willows, cattails, and sycamores that
have volunteered in the five years since the building opened. “But the casual
quality of that is good,” Vergason adds.

Held back by a new weir wall, the upper portion of the pond
settles out sediment by stilling the initial outflow of water from the site,
and the plants take up nutrients before the water falls into the lower pool.
The introduction of the weir wall also created areas of gradual deepening and
shallow areas for submergent and emergent plantings to complete the
environmental components of the pond, Vergason explains. “We could not change
the precise configuration of the 100-year flood line of the main pond, as it
was part of the legal description of property exchange between Gannett and
WestPark,” he adds.

The lower half of the pond is regulated by control–release
weirs concealed beneath a deck that was built on the far edge of the pond. The
weirs govern the flow of water from the pond into an existing streambed. Behind the
deck structure is an emergency overflow that, during unusually heavy rainfalls,
releases water through a small woodland stand into a drainage swale, then
through a culvert under the Dulles Access Road into Scott’s Run on the opposite
side of the highway.

Water is pumped up from the stormwater pond and runs back
through the stepped vegetative pools in the courtyard, where it is aerated and
cleansed. Vergason expresses a hint of frustration that the roof leaders from
the building go directly into the stormwater pond, but he says it was one of
the concessions to the fast pace of the project. “Due to time constraints, we
did not want to tie the approval of the building—and thus the roof
downspouts—to the design of the stormwater management pond. As it stands now,
the roof drains flow directly into the pond, where ideally they should have
been part of the runnel and pool system that retains and slows the water prior
to it entering the pond.” The good news, he allows, is that the runnels collect
everything except for the roof water, and they do it in a manner that
structures the site. Stormwater also is used for the landscape’s irrigation.

Rising high beyond the pond is the wooded hill that once was
the prime development target. Now this section of the site is a recreation
zone, housing a ball field that’s actively used by the company’s softball
league. In addition, a walking trail weaves up to the hilltop and back along
the edge of the pond, and a space is carved out for a volleyball court.

Considering the gains made here as a result of Vergason’s
touting an environmental agenda, the landscape at Gannett/USA Today is a model
for other corporations to follow. “But it certainly is not groundbreaking,”
says Vergason. “It is the kind of thinking you’d like to think most
corporations adopt. There are two important things about it: First is the
emphasis on the relationship between the inside and the outside, both visually
and physically. Second is an environmental ethic, some effort to deal with
environmental issues in a positive fashion. Neither one of those ideas is
novel, but I think this project is a good illustration of the application of
principles that are not new, but are not always applied.”

And, as Vergason is quick to add, the project benefited
greatly from an integrated design approach, so that all the central spaces of
the building wrap around the central outdoor space and all of the public
circulation faces the space as well. The outcome is that people on the outside
see activity within the building and people on the office floors have constant
visual contact with the outside. So, in the final analysis, the greatest
strength of the Gannett/USA Today complex may well be its
process, a high-level collaboration between two closely related
professions—architecture and landscape architecture—that don’t always connect.

And in this business, that’s news.

Vernon Mays is Curator
of Architecture + Design at the Virginia Center for Architecture and editor of
Inform, the magazine of the Virginia Society of the American Institute of
Architects.